Jelly Bean ticks up a few more points in latest platform numbers

The latest Android platform version numbers are in, and things are marching slowly along in the direction you'd expect. Jelly Bean -- which comprises Android 4.1 and 4.2 -- ticked up a few percentage points to 16.5 percent of active devices as measured over the past two weeks. (It was a 2.9 percentage point increase, to be precise.)

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Jelly Bean ticks up a few more points in latest platform numbers

Phil, I'm pretty sure you're missing the real story here. 4.x users now outnumber Gingerbread users (45.1% to 44.2%)! Yay! Adding in Honeycomb users, that makes 46.3% of users on 3.0+, which is required to use many new API's. In the next month or two, that number should surpass 50%. I guess these numbers go to show how well 2012 phones like the Galaxy S III have sold.

Any clues as to what could be the main reason for the drop of 1% in honeycomb? I would imagine mainly that they replaced their tablet.
On other topic, I for one preferred my old galaxy s to have froyo. I liked the UI better and updating it to gingerbread didn't help me much cause the apps I games I wanted to play wouldn't play cause they were to big and crashed. Also battery was better when it had froyo. Today I sport a N4 and life is better

44% still use Gingerbread. If you count Eclair and Froyo, over 50% of the market has yet to move to ICS or better.

Yet, you have major developers who are deciding to require a 4.x version or higher on their apps, often without any valid reason other than laziness in implementing Google's backward compatibility library for Holo.

(NOTE: And, despite the myth, not all phones, even some previously "high end" phones, are able to run CyanogenMod or ICS versions of CyanogenMod. And, despite the myth, not all users upgrade their phones every 6 months to 1 year anyway. And, despite the myth, people with said phones between 1-2 years old DO BUY APPS.

Gingerbread is solid, without bugs and its fast. It doesn't have the problems ICS does on some phones and it's light on the battery. You can install a launcher like Holo that will come very close to turning your phone into ICS - you keep the speed and battery life of GB, but get the advantages of ICS. This is why GB is so popular.

@ZachA: That's all well in good, but for many people who have Gingerbread, that's it for them because they can't move on. Simply put, there are most likely Smartphones and those Smartphones including my old LG Thrive that is running Frojo doesn't meet the specs needed to be upgraded to Ice Cream Sandwich, let along Jelly Bean. Plus carriers most likely aren't going to upgrade those Smartphones anymore. My upgrade stopped at Android 2.2.2. That's why I upgrade to a GNex.

Even more, consumers are still buying budget Smartphones that are running Ginderbread and most likely will never see an upgrade mainly due to the carriers not willing and of course the specs. But Ginderbread is a good version of Android OS and will be used for at least another 2-3 years.

The donut and eclair people need to upgrade... for seriously! That stuff is from 2010 and barely worked then! Modern apps have to slow them to a crawl, especially considering most of those devices had less than 1GB storage on board.

With as awesome as Jelly Bean is, not sure why anyone would not want it.

People do want it, but most phones that have the capacity to run it are not upgraded by their manufacturers. This is the great shortcoming of Android. Once a phone is out, it's forgotten for the most part in terms of updates. IOS keeps phones several generations back current with regular upgrades.

The only way for many of us to get JB is to root and it's not as easy or safe as jail breaking was on the iPhone.

I wouldn't go that far. I'd say he's half-right or better on most of what he said.
Most users DO want Jellybean (if they know it exists). But I think he overestimates how many devices can run it well. A lot of devices just can't handle it. On the other hand, OEM's also are slow to update, and some never update their devices at all.

As for rooting/roming being less safe than jailbreaking, that's just false. Rooting is 100% safe. ROM's are less safe if you use an alpha or beta build, but pretty much all devices have very stable builds. No OEM will intentionally brick your phone if they find out you are rooting, unlike Apple.

Only Android enthusiasts (and apparently, a stunningly large number of apple fanboys) have any idea what the difference is between froyo and jelly bean and the rest. For the masses, if their phone works they just keep using it. When it's time to upgrade they look for a bigger screen or more memory or some other flashy feature, and could care less about the OS. For the enthusiasts, there are a wealth of roms for old handsets. Somehow, the only ones hurt by the "android abandonment" are all the iphone fanboys who seem to want to make a big deal about it at every turn and probably dont even own an android device anyway. Good riddance to their trolling.

b. the thing you link doesn't actually show the current percent of devices running 4.x or lower. all it says is "The population below these limits was below 4% WHEN SUPPORT WAS DROPPED." that was a while ago.

c. android sucks ass when it comes to updating. here is a little example:

HTC Desire (a very popular and widely available device) came out in the summer of 2010 running android 2.1. it got an update to android 2.2 later that year and was never updated again. updating to 2.3 is possible but not supported by HTC. same story with my Droid X, it stopped getting updates before i was even able to upgrade again.

iPhone 4, also came out in the summer of 2010. still getting updates right now. last update was a few weeks ago to the latest iOS (6.1.2)

These are facts, and no matter how much anyone hates Apple, it is hard to argue that Android sucks when it comes to updating.

Android is great for updating, It is OEM's with their skinned crap on android that sucks, blur, touchpiss, and NO-Sense, are the reason why there are no updates. OEM's need to get rid of their software overlay's and just run pure android and just make all the add ons apps on their phones, and if their apps are good enough they could sell them in the play store for other devices to use and make money from them.

If each OEM would make one Nexus device a year and add it to their line up of phones they would probably sell more that their own skinned devices.